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I don’t go to the theatre that often but this week was slightly unusual: two different theatres, two nights in a row, one of which is brand new. It was The Berry Theatre‘s gala opening evening tonight, which was excellent, but that’s not exactly what this post is about.

Being brand new, I was hoping that it would provide an opportunity to do something I’ve been meaning to try for a while and, sure enough, the theatre wasn’t in OpenStreetMap yet! So, armed with a dangerous amount of knowledge gained during Nick‘s enthusiastic OSM presentations yesterday, I fired up JOSM and contributed my first node.

This weekend was our six month wedding anniversary, unfortunately Schott’s Almanac was no help at all working out what the traditional six month wedding anniversary symbol is, only starting after a whole year with cotton. Since there doesn’t seem to be an agreed upon six month symbol, I choose hot chocolate after we enjoyed one at the end of a very relaxing afternoon retracing part of our wedding tour of Hampshire. If you’re in the area, I thoroughly recommend The Old House Hotel and the Marriott Meon Valley; they were both superb on our wedding day.

(I was pretty pleased with the results of tinkering with Open Street Map for our wedding invitations although, after stories of some of the detours our guests took, it may not have been worth it!!)

Unfortunately decorating the bathroom is higher up the to do list than blogging at the moment — I’d rather be blogging as I’ve yet to gas myself typing on a computer! — so I haven’t had a chance to mention some cool and interesting things that have been cluttering up my list of open browser tabs. While I wait for the paint fumes to subside before going to bed, here are a few of them, in no particular order…

Today, on the way to Wickham (which is actually in exactly the opposite direction from my house!), I finally made it to my nearest marker, outside Romsey. I had some stones left over from an earlier project to secure a sat nav in my car’s cup holder…

I haven’t read many blogs lately (I blame Technorati favourites going AWOL… erm, and I’ve been a tad busy). I could do the same as Kelly and declare blog bankruptcy but I thought I’d try something different. I’ve had a skim through and these look kind of interesting:

I’m a bit of a fan of maps, even strange ones, and I’ve been wondering lately about a world of virtual worlds and how that might look on a globe, with each virtual world represented by countries, with continents of related worlds. So a continent with countries for the Second Life grid, corporate grids and Open Sim grids for example. Beyond just looking cool, I think mapping out our virtual world – be that social networks, information/tags, 3d environments – in a visual way will make it more accessible. Still checking to see if someone has done it already but if they haven’t I’m thinking FreeEarthmightwork for a little experiment…

Over lunch we were discussing how it would be handy to know whether a paycut would be covered by cost savings of a shorter commute. A mushup to do the calculation for you seemed pretty doable, and you could use the same thing to find out how much money you’d save working at home a couple of days a week. Oh yes, and the environment etc.!

Well, it seems that there are at least a couple ofmashups already that do part of the job. Unfortunately both these examples are a bit US-centric and don’t take in to account PAYE (so now I’m being UK centric!) but they’re a good demonstration.

I also discovered that the OS now have an API! Looking through their FAQ, they (or more likely their lawyers) have some funny ideas about how the web works, but still, better than not supporting mashups at all.